Why the hell did the MPEG4 people have to go and kill their own format this way??
They probably don't care so much about computer playback of video. I think the MPEG video codecs were mostly aimed at television sets. They think of the television model where the $5 for the decoding patents pales in comparison to the cost of the hardware. The computer market is a jucy secondary market, but they don't want to canabalize the TV market. This assumes HDTV in most countries will adopt MPEG4. They are also looking at the cost of developing the technology and thinking, we don't have a plan for profiting here...
MPEG4 is chock full of computer file formats too so if it takes off at all there will be a lot of partial MPEG4 support, and no single player that supports everything. Some will use patented tech, some not, at least with MPEG4 the competitor can pay the patent holder a royalty and try to compete.
Technically they work just fine, but in a lot of buildings they have to put the trap really close to your window, since the feader is inaccessible or very accesible (like on your roof in an apartment building.) This means you can take it off and get antenna cable.
Of course I don't think they care much, when I had RoadRunner, antenna cable cost maybe $10, RoadRunner without cable cost $50, or $40 if you got basic cable ($40) or better. It looked to me like they already factored it in. Of course cable is just horrible when you are sitting less than a mile from the transmitter with direct line of sight, just gives you ghosting when you plug in the cable.
I can't image this being true. Maybe some company claims copyright, but how could this possibly hold up in court? Has it been tested? I remember that Mac-Windows case for user interfaces, but Mac lost that one, how could an even less novel thing like a file format be protected?
Maybe if there is some algorithm involved where you can't find a different algorithm (aka GIF), but if you made a GIF file with bzip2 compression wouldn't that be ok? Like you could write a JVM compatible program, that say also ran with something you called Chai, which didn't use the name Java except to say, "Hey we can read Java(TM) files." wouldn't that be ok?
Some of them are even teenagers (not that they necessarily comport themselves more appropriately than toddlers while in public). Perhaps these are the kids that were being referred to - you do not want to always follow your kids around.
Those weren't the problem. Most kids that age will listen when you ask them not to do something. Plus, you can kick them out. 99.9% of the time they aren't a problem in a public library, they are self-selected to be there in the first place. It's just study groups that can get too rowdy; we didn't have a study room, it was just a small community library.
The point here is that one would generally consider a public library a place where one could let one's children go safely and without supervision instead of worrying about pornography and whatnot.
Librarians hate you, you know. I worked at a community library in high school and unsupervised children were a huge problem. You can't just kick them out when they make noise or generally act like unsupervised children. You have to find the irresponcible parent and have the "you're a bad parent" speech. I think my supervisor had no problem with it, but it's hard for a 16 year old to explain to a 35 year old that people are trying to study, and will you please take you're hellspawn out of here NOW.
Uh, the number of bits has nothing to do with aliasing. Aliasing depends on the sampling rate and the maximum frequencies present in your original signal.
Actually you are sort of right, it would normally be called quantization error. But if you just look at the signal as a 2 dimenational entity it is still aliasing. It doesn't really effect dynamic range, that's just a scale factor. You can increase the dynamic range with more bits, or decrease the digital noise(quantization error), or both.
I'd like more bits per sample, slightly higher sampling rate (to avoid the distortion of the high frequencies.), but most of all I want unmixed sound on my CD with a mix program. And I'd like the mix program to be open so that I can download creative mix files from DJ's for my favorite CD's
AT there was never government protection for Bell.. Im also a Canuck, but I do know a bit of the telco history.. Bell acheived a monopoly through mergers in the early early years, and buyouts later on. A communications network is a natural monopoly and once Bell acheaved it it wasent that hard to maintain.
Not quite true. AT&T had almost all of the telephones in large cities and in the North East corridor. But there were still many competitors but they weren't connected to AT&T because they knew they couldn't compete if you could call people on their network from AT&T phones, since they were local and with AT&T you could call your aunt in NY, but not your mom down the street. But this was an annoyance for congressmen who needed to get a phone on each network to be able to reach everyone. So they passed a law that required everyone to connect to AT&T or sell your network to them, everyone but GTE sold out and a few tiny networks in marginal markets. GTE was also formed through mergers, but concentrated on rural areas that AT&T didn't want because the have much lower margins. They had about 70% of the market after gorvernment intervention, and 70% in 1984.
Once they had the government protecting them they got things like 'universal service' where any of their potential competitors in profitable areas like cities would be required by law to subsidise them, ostensibly to provide low cost service in non-profitable areas. The bells inherited this protection and still gets first bids on the universal service slush fund (of which they use about a 1/4 to actually subsidise low profit lines).
I guess Im ranting on here, but the moral of the story is that we were all better off with a well regulated monopoly. Maybe where you are, my phone bill has only fallen over the last 10 years.
Oil will probably never run out, it will get more expensive as the supply of it dwindles. The price will rise, but while energy demand will rise other sources of energy will displace it. So the price won't quickly become astronomical, simply because other energy sources will displace the demand. Stationary uses like power plants will move to other sources first, but planes and cars will continue using it, then cars will move to natural gas(which will have it's own rise and fall curve), etc.
I think the biggest shocks will not come from producers, there are more joining the global market, like Russia & co. The biggest shocks will be as demand is curtailed. At some point gas stations will just cease to exist because there won't be enough demand to support them. The loss of infrastructure will cause more drivers to switch and all of a sudden oil will be dirt cheap for maybe a decade or so. This is many many years out but it is almost inevidable (unless it turns out bacteria are making most of the oil or something. Then, ugh, government will be needed to get us of the tit.)
My biggest fear is that oil will run out before doing enough preliminary research, even solar power can be very destructive of the environment if it uses up land inefficiently. But just image if we switched to Coal in all US and Chinese power plants, we'd all be caughing up gallons of flegm. Or used windmills to the extent that it wiped out bird populations, or disrupted local weather patterns in a negative way. The funny thing is the pure market people infesting./ might have a point when it comes to things like farm subsidies which keep way too much land in agricultural production. If we depopulated the less productive farming (which happen to be more energy and water intensive) areas now it would be easier to carve up parks and 'energy farms' out of them a hundred years or two hundred years hence.
Colonization is a strange word to use. As if its population did not consist almost exclusively of the descendants of the vikings who settled Island about a thousand years ago.
Hmmm, lets see they blockaded the ports and imposed taxes to the extent that people were starving to death... Besides the population is quite different from the other Scandinavian countries, they stopped over at in England and Ireland for slaves. And, well, they took a lot of them, there are a lot of green eyes and red and brown hair in Iceland. Culturaly it's different too, they were literate 700-800 years before Denmark's citizens. They never had a king. Contrary to popular myth the island wasn't empty when the Vikings arrived, there were leftovers of Rome with a few monisteries there already. It was empty enough that there is no record of fighting between the groups, just curiosity. Vikings were quite content with marauding the 'primatives' they didn't live with. The Viking thing is way to played up though, the settlers were more interested in farming than war. If they had killed all the monks they certainly would have written about it, they liked books about that kinda thing.
By the way, what does Iceland export besides Bjork albums and its own citizens (my good friend is Icelandic)?:)
Fish, Kitty Litter, Aluminum.;) I think the EU and Japan are bigger markets than the US for Iceland.
There are lots of tiny exports like cheese. They grow Bannanas and Tomatoes, but I think that's only for the local market (cheap electricity == greenhouses).
Lawnmowers? Not really, electric and manual are used, doesn't grow so fast.
Chainsaws? Maybe a dozen, most of the trees were cut down a thousand years ago.
Rototillers? Not everyone is an American.
Mobile worksite generators? Hospitals and such may have them, there has been a move to decentralize power for some time, hence the geothermal. The problem is that if a long distance transmission line goes out for some town of a 100 in the North it's really hard to reconnect them in the middle of a snow storm.
What about cooking? Electric Range is universal.
Are there no gas grills or propane camp stoves in Iceland? There are some propane camp stoves, grills use charcoal, makes for better burgers.
I think you're overlooking some things. And you've overlooked the point.
Those uses are too tiny to even worry about. I was going to say just transportation instead of listing the three things that use 99.9% of the fuel, but I doubt you would have had a much different reply. I'm surprised you didn't list home heating, but I guess that would have made you too obvious a straw man.
Iceland has to import all its oil, which accounts for near hald of it's energy needs. It would be absolutely idiotic not to fix that since it's relatively easy and painless. It's running a small trade deficit which would be a large surplus if it weren't for the oil addiction. Its economy is growing quickly for a developed nation and pollution is already a problem that looks to get worse if nothing is done.
Iceland gets about 40% of it's energy from fossil fuels, this is what it wants to get away from. All of this fuel is for cars, busses and ships. It has a huge electricity surplus from hydro and geothermal plants built after it got it's independence when European colonialization collapsed in the 40's. A lot of this energy is exported in the form of aluminum but you can't easily burn that, so hydrogen just makes a lot of sense. Iceland was also burned by leaded gas, they kept using it until some time in the 80's or early 90's, and it became the number one pollutant in the capital. This was discovered in the city playgrounds, which had hundred of times the safe limits for lead. Just image the media fiasco.
The whole running out of oil was based on the continental US oil reserves running down, but then the middle east oil was discovered. If you listen carefully the experts don't say we'll run out but that the cost will increase to a point where other fuels cost less. There will still be plenty of oil for candles and plastics, but it will be too expensive to simply burn for fuel just like we no longer burn whale blubber for fuel.
We can also make candles and plastics out of agricultural oils, and eventually we will. Whether that will be in 200 years or 2000 I can't tell you, and frankly don't care.
I've written a vision program in linux and later one in Windows, I can't see ever doing the windows thing again. By the end of the project I had spent much more time on Windows annoyances than it would have taken to write a linux driver.
Why not use a solid framegrabber like the Osprey? Do you have some super high res progressive scan cameras or something? Most vision research is done on prerecorded video so I'm assuming your doing some real-time tracking. If this is a short 2-4 month project and you need the firewire cameras sticking with the working Windows setup might be the answer. If it's longer there is at least one good book on writing linux drivers (there are pointers in the kernel Docs.)
I prefer the laptop when watching a DVD by myself or with one other. I can take of my contacts and give my eyes some rest. I hook up the sound to my mini-amplifer and speakers, or even the TV if in a hurry for decent sound.
Then there is the whole region thing, cheap DVD players don't play the imports at the local video store (as per their signage, no refunds if you've got a region 1 only DVD player.)
If the price is really high, maybe someone out there will seriously underbid them. While WiFi will always be cheaper it's so much slower. I know I'm always maxing out my two 100Base-T lines because of NFS. My SysAdmin promises Gigabit ethernet next time he buys a switch... Don't get me wrong, I love the WiFi for when I bring in my laptop, but it's not really a replacement for wires. Unless you know everyone is just web browsing or something.
If no one will bid low, maybe you can hire some high school students, buy some testing equipment and do the wiring yourself. It's not exactly rocket science. It won't be so pretty if it's outside the walls but it's never pretty behind desks anyway.
My system itself makes noise. It seems to be tied to "stuff happening" inside the box
I think this is a lot more common than people think. I converted an old PC into a "quiet" PC, well router. Then I started noticing high pitched noises coming from the thing at night. And it was synced with netowork activity. At first I though it was just some errant radio waves getting to the TV. Unplugged it, still there. Unplugged everything but the router(old PC) and a couple network devices, still there. Unplugged the network, still there but much lower.
Later I listened for it in the day time, and it was there, just drowned out by the higher level of white noise. It was probably always there, just too many fans muffling it. I've also had brand new power supplies(A HP Journada ones for one) that made a horrible and sometimes loud noise.
I'm guessing that some small change in the temperature profile of the chip, or maybe the monitor signal filter will get rid of the noise future models of this video card lineage. But I don't recall learning anything about engineering around this type of bug as an EE.
Thats true, but think about Knuth's work on TeX. That is still in serious use.
Still someone would have to make some big contribution to it before users would choose the proprietary version over the free one. Unless they have some kind of monopoly that can force downgrades on users, then the solution is to eliminate the monopoly not build ineffectual legal walls against some of its actions.
One of the circumstances in which software remains current is when it has been widely adopted as a standard for communication.
Right, this has the same natural protection as TEX, it's a defacto standard. Open source is still available in the public domain even after the copyright has expired, for anyone to bug fix.
[early expiration] I've just got to ask: Why?
Because I've made commercial software that did exactly the same thing that someone had already done in open source. It would have saved humanity a few extra brain cycles if I could have just fixed their implementation and used it. Now I don't think it's fair to use something right away because the author might have written it to fight some entrenced commercial interest, but after a number of years either they have written a copy themselves or will never do so. If the commercial company is still around then it might actually help if some other commercial software incorporates the feature and competes, lowering the price of the software closer to marginal cost. You might say that they could always just call me up and ask for a licence. But there is still a barrier, they need to test the program before deciding they can use it and they aren't likely to do so if there is a significant possibility I might say no.
While working at a commercial company I once e-mailed the author of an unpatented algorithm that advertised source availability in his paper for the code, he said no it's only for non-profits. I had told him I just wanted it as reference for writing my own implementation; The paper wasn't clear on a number of points. It turned out the algorithm didn't deal with one of the cases but we would have saved three programmers a month of work if we had gotten his source to test initially.
Another case, I have a library posted on my website that's under LGPL. But I clearly state that I want just about anyone to be able to use it and will re-licence it for free to just about anyone. But when a commercial company wanted to incorporate it in their product I got like ten e-mails before they were confident they could use it. That's a substancial barrier even if it is just because they are unfamiliar with open source. (The licence I'll give to anyone for free basically says you can distribute a million copies for free. But must still send me bugfixes before each product ship or 10 days thereafter and each copy after one million costs $20. If they are too big for that they must use pure-LGPL if the still want to use it.)
You're going to have to turn the copyright office into something that decides which category a work falls into. If they handle it the way the patent office handles claims, we could see people claiming a software program is derivative of its manual, which has 20 years protection. Well you could simply say that derivative works get no more protection than they would get if they were copyrighted on their own. And code in books could expire in 5 years even if the rest of the book were protected longer.
If Joe User can run old versions of software, it encourages commercial developers to break these old version rather than simply improve the product. Software with source would be protected longer even in it's compiled form. The problem I'm trying to address isn't just to force innovation, but to also protect software from companies that go out of business or authors that lose the source on some utility they have forgetten about after X years. I think companies will be less likely to simply break older versions because some home users and small companies would be likely to use the expired versions and those who buy the newer versions would want to interoperate with them. But I may be wrong.
I think 5 years for software and 10 years for source code is more appropriate, and even that's short. What if after 2 years they could release the source and get the 5 year protection? I think my software numbers could be a little short for small market software, but it's hard to draw that line. I remember some stat in the 80's that 50% of the sales of mass market software were in the first 6 weeks. That's no longer true, probably because software is much more mature now so there isn't as much reason to upgrade. But software written for small markets is still in much need of improvement so a 2 year old program there is probably not very useful. I think 10 years is way to long, it may allow you to get a 95% of possible sales, but I think the 80% mark is a better place to draw the line because of quickly diminishing returns. I left extensions in for those cases where they haven't reached the 80% mark by expiration, but this doesn't apply to free software so it's a little unfair in that.
I came up with my numbers by thinking about when 99% of producers would have realized 80% of potential sales and then added a few years, except in software where I see more damage in stopping progress(probably because I'm involved.)
Basing licensing fees on percentages of gross profit creates accounting problems, as well as a pricing problem, as someone who simply gives the original away for free does not have to pay a license. True, maybe the extensions idea should be abandoned, or simply be less generous with no accounting requirement. Say 1/4 term, with a flat $10,000 fee.
The moral rights argument with respect to the mandatory licensing scheme after an author's death seems specious to me. If the author's not around to approve it, either the author's estate can approve a derivative work, or the derivative author can wait until the copyright expires. I was thinking of Nietzsche where his sister was a anti-semite and "saved" his reputation as a hater of anti-semites by holding back his works and editing out things in preparing manuscripts for publishing. It's also informed by those estates who even try to block movie adaptations of log expired copyrights. Maybe there are examples of estates acting on the creators behalf. I almost used the Ayn Rand one as a good example, but she'd probably think of them as leaches on her fame.
A copyright law shouldn't be designed to be GNU friendly; a GNU license should be designed to be responsive to changes in copyright law. I agree to a point, it shouldn't get any favorable treatment, but I think it should be protected from significantly disfavorable treatment. As a programmer I don't want to just write software that will be immediately ripped off by a commercial interest, especially if I plan to dual licence to make some $$$.
The copy protection clause is just as ridiculous as the DMCA. "Oh, that easily deciphered format is really copy protection, so this isn't under copyright." I think a reasonable line could be drawn, it's more a result of my anger at copyright being longer than the media the work is recorded on so it may be lost to humanity forever without some criminal activity(which is only likely on the more popular works). With my yearly limits it seems less needed, though I could certainly imagine a publisher loving some paper that disintigrated in the bright light of a copy machine.
The purpose of copyleft is freedom. Once copyleft expires, it is back to the bad old days of breaking interoperability for commercial advantage, keeping the source code secret, so that most programming is duplication of work already done, etc. There is no public interest in having copyleft expire.
Software is rarely current after 5 years, if some commercial company incorperates a source five years after it was initially published they would have to do a lot of work to make it competitive.
If I thought my GNU software were perpetual I'd but an early expiration to public domain in there. In fact I may do so anyway for things I open source from now on.
30 years fiction 20 years historic, lit-crit, and reference non-fiction 10 years self-help and current affairs non-fiction 5 years registered software (source code published) 2 years non-registered software
With a possible 1/2 period extension if you are still selling at 10% of the rate of the best year of sales.
I don't think the right should automatically expire due to the death of the author if his will states it shouldn't but linence at a reasonable price (no more that 5% of gross say, or 20% of profit) should become cumpulsary since the author is no longer around to say some new adaption isn't to his liking.
This isn't particularly GNU friendly extensions are all based on sales, but I think it would strike a good balance on copyright for society and hence fulfill the main reason programmers choose an open source licence.
I would further add that the source code should be published at the end of support for any software for anyone wishing to copyright their work, and using 'copy protection' should automatically revoke and claims to copyright protection. Hence those wishing to avoid copyright would need to licence everything and sue only the person that violated the contract but once the first copy was made work would be in the open. This would discourage these licences except for made to order software where it makes sense.
I'm just putting this out there because I want to hear what you have to say. Are my numbers to conservative? Too liberal? Just right?
I saw a Transgaming programmer playing Max Payne on his laptop a couple months ago. If they can get a Direct X 8.0 game to run under WineX it is probably your best bet. I looked at their support for it and they said it worked best with the CVS version of Wine, though it still didn't render fonts correctly and would crash when you tried to build stuff. Though they are working on getting it working, and if you buy a copy I know they let you vote for what games to support.
No, because some people's need for communication devices (doctors, for example) far, far outweighs our right to a quiet theatre.
B*llshit! Beepers have been around for years and theaters have been holding them for doctors on call almost as long. If you are a doctor or fighter pilot or whatever either don't go to the theatre when on call or use the services. If you're at a low end place give 'em the $5 tip before the show.
I personally think the laptop guy should have been kicked out, people with their vibrating cellphones and backlit palms are annoying enough.
Enjoy the wireless before the film, get a good seat, and if the film sucks enough to be browsing slashdot, leave.
Adding costs to law enforcement means that either fewer crimes get solved or taxes go up.
Hopefully fewer crimes are solved. Remember the police consider perfectely reasonable things like drug trafficing and looking at pictures. When they're forced to narrow down that list of crimes to physically hurting people and or stealing significant amounts of cash or goods we will all be better of.
In the US the federal government is protected from lawsuits by its constitution. Congress can allow citizens to sue it via acts like the the freedom of information act. (Or by abridging natural rights or rights protected by the constitution itself.)
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Why the hell did the MPEG4 people have to go and kill their own format this way??
They probably don't care so much about computer playback of video. I think the MPEG video codecs were mostly aimed at television sets. They think of the television model where the $5 for the decoding patents pales in comparison to the cost of the hardware. The computer market is a jucy secondary market, but they don't want to canabalize the TV market. This assumes HDTV in most countries will adopt MPEG4. They are also looking at the cost of developing the technology and thinking, we don't have a plan for profiting here...
MPEG4 is chock full of computer file formats too so if it takes off at all there will be a lot of partial MPEG4 support, and no single player that supports everything. Some will use patented tech, some not, at least with MPEG4 the competitor can pay the patent holder a royalty and try to compete.
Technically they work just fine, but in a lot of buildings they have to put the trap really close to your window, since the feader is inaccessible or very accesible (like on your roof in an apartment building.) This means you can take it off and get antenna cable.
Of course I don't think they care much, when I had RoadRunner, antenna cable cost maybe $10, RoadRunner without cable cost $50, or $40 if you got basic cable ($40) or better. It looked to me like they already factored it in. Of course cable is just horrible when you are sitting less than a mile from the transmitter with direct line of sight, just gives you ghosting when you plug in the cable.
I can't image this being true. Maybe some company claims copyright, but how could this possibly hold up in court? Has it been tested? I remember that Mac-Windows case for user interfaces, but Mac lost that one, how could an even less novel thing like a file format be protected?
Maybe if there is some algorithm involved where you can't find a different algorithm (aka GIF), but if you made a GIF file with bzip2 compression wouldn't that be ok? Like you could write a JVM compatible program, that say also ran with something you called Chai, which didn't use the name Java except to say, "Hey we can read Java(TM) files." wouldn't that be ok?
Some of them are even teenagers (not that they necessarily comport themselves more appropriately than toddlers while in public). Perhaps these are the kids that were being referred to - you do not want to always follow your kids around.
Those weren't the problem. Most kids that age will listen when you ask them not to do something. Plus, you can kick them out. 99.9% of the time they aren't a problem in a public library, they are self-selected to be there in the first place. It's just study groups that can get too rowdy; we didn't have a study room, it was just a small community library.
The point here is that one would generally consider a public library a place where one could let one's children go safely and without supervision instead of worrying about pornography and whatnot.
Librarians hate you, you know. I worked at a community library in high school and unsupervised children were a huge problem. You can't just kick them out when they make noise or generally act like unsupervised children. You have to find the irresponcible parent and have the "you're a bad parent" speech. I think my supervisor had no problem with it, but it's hard for a 16 year old to explain to a 35 year old that people are trying to study, and will you please take you're hellspawn out of here NOW.
Uh, the number of bits has nothing to do with aliasing. Aliasing depends on the sampling rate and the maximum frequencies present in your original signal.
Actually you are sort of right, it would normally be called quantization error. But if you just look at the signal as a 2 dimenational entity it is still aliasing. It doesn't really effect dynamic range, that's just a scale factor. You can increase the dynamic range with more bits, or decrease the digital noise(quantization error), or both.
I'd like more bits per sample, slightly higher sampling rate (to avoid the distortion of the high frequencies.), but most of all I want unmixed sound on my CD with a mix program. And I'd like the mix program to be open so that I can download creative mix files from DJ's for my favorite CD's
AT there was never government protection for Bell.. Im also a Canuck, but I do know a bit of the telco history.. Bell acheived a monopoly through mergers in the early early years, and buyouts later on. A communications network is a natural monopoly and once Bell acheaved it it wasent that hard to maintain.
Not quite true. AT&T had almost all of the telephones in large cities and in the North East corridor. But there were still many competitors but they weren't connected to AT&T because they knew they couldn't compete if you could call people on their network from AT&T phones, since they were local and with AT&T you could call your aunt in NY, but not your mom down the street. But this was an annoyance for congressmen who needed to get a phone on each network to be able to reach everyone. So they passed a law that required everyone to connect to AT&T or sell your network to them, everyone but GTE sold out and a few tiny networks in marginal markets. GTE was also formed through mergers, but concentrated on rural areas that AT&T didn't want because the have much lower margins. They had about 70% of the market after gorvernment intervention, and 70% in 1984.
Once they had the government protecting them they got things like 'universal service' where any of their potential competitors in profitable areas like cities would be required by law to subsidise them, ostensibly to provide low cost service in non-profitable areas. The bells inherited this protection and still gets first bids on the universal service slush fund (of which they use about a 1/4 to actually subsidise low profit lines).
I guess Im ranting on here, but the moral of the story is that we were all better off with a well regulated monopoly.
Maybe where you are, my phone bill has only fallen over the last 10 years.
Oil will probably never run out, it will get more expensive as the supply of it dwindles. The price will rise, but while energy demand will rise other sources of energy will displace it. So the price won't quickly become astronomical, simply because other energy sources will displace the demand. Stationary uses like power plants will move to other sources first, but planes and cars will continue using it, then cars will move to natural gas(which will have it's own rise and fall curve), etc.
./ might have a point when it comes to things like farm subsidies which keep way too much land in agricultural production. If we depopulated the less productive farming (which happen to be more energy and water intensive) areas now it would be easier to carve up parks and 'energy farms' out of them a hundred years or two hundred years hence.
I think the biggest shocks will not come from producers, there are more joining the global market, like Russia & co. The biggest shocks will be as demand is curtailed. At some point gas stations will just cease to exist because there won't be enough demand to support them. The loss of infrastructure will cause more drivers to switch and all of a sudden oil will be dirt cheap for maybe a decade or so. This is many many years out but it is almost inevidable (unless it turns out bacteria are making most of the oil or something. Then, ugh, government will be needed to get us of the tit.)
My biggest fear is that oil will run out before doing enough preliminary research, even solar power can be very destructive of the environment if it uses up land inefficiently. But just image if we switched to Coal in all US and Chinese power plants, we'd all be caughing up gallons of flegm. Or used windmills to the extent that it wiped out bird populations, or disrupted local weather patterns in a negative way. The funny thing is the pure market people infesting
Colonization is a strange word to use. As if its population did not consist almost exclusively of the descendants of the vikings who settled Island about a thousand years ago.
Hmmm, lets see they blockaded the ports and imposed taxes to the extent that people were starving to death... Besides the population is quite different from the other Scandinavian countries, they stopped over at in England and Ireland for slaves. And, well, they took a lot of them, there are a lot of green eyes and red and brown hair in Iceland. Culturaly it's different too, they were literate 700-800 years before Denmark's citizens. They never had a king. Contrary to popular myth the island wasn't empty when the Vikings arrived, there were leftovers of Rome with a few monisteries there already. It was empty enough that there is no record of fighting between the groups, just curiosity. Vikings were quite content with marauding the 'primatives' they didn't live with. The Viking thing is way to played up though, the settlers were more interested in farming than war. If they had killed all the monks they certainly would have written about it, they liked books about that kinda thing.
By the way, what does Iceland export besides Bjork albums and its own citizens (my good friend is Icelandic)? :)
;)
Fish, Kitty Litter, Aluminum.
I think the EU and Japan are bigger markets than the US for Iceland.
There are lots of tiny exports like cheese. They grow Bannanas and Tomatoes, but I think that's only for the local market (cheap electricity == greenhouses).
Airplanes?
yes
Tractors?
yes
Lawnmowers?
Not really, electric and manual are used, doesn't
grow so fast.
Chainsaws?
Maybe a dozen, most of the trees were cut down a thousand years ago.
Rototillers?
Not everyone is an American.
Mobile worksite generators?
Hospitals and such may have them, there has been a move to decentralize power for some time, hence the geothermal. The problem is that if a long distance transmission line goes out for some town of a 100 in the North it's really hard to reconnect them in the middle of a snow storm.
What about cooking?
Electric Range is universal.
Are there no gas grills or propane camp stoves in Iceland?
There are some propane camp stoves, grills use charcoal, makes for better burgers.
I think you're overlooking some things.
And you've overlooked the point.
Those uses are too tiny to even worry about.
I was going to say just transportation instead of listing the three things that use 99.9% of the fuel, but I doubt you would have had a much different reply. I'm surprised you didn't list home heating, but I guess that would have made you too obvious a straw man.
Iceland has to import all its oil, which accounts for near hald of it's energy needs. It would be absolutely idiotic not to fix that since it's relatively easy and painless. It's running a small trade deficit which would be a large surplus if it weren't for the oil addiction. Its economy is growing quickly for a developed nation and pollution is already a problem that looks to get worse if nothing is done.
Iceland gets about 40% of it's energy from fossil fuels, this is what it wants to get away from. All of this fuel is for cars, busses and ships. It has a huge electricity surplus from hydro and geothermal plants built after it got it's independence when European colonialization collapsed in the 40's. A lot of this energy is exported in the form of aluminum but you can't easily burn that, so hydrogen just makes a lot of sense. Iceland was also burned by leaded gas, they kept using it until some time in the 80's or early 90's, and it became the number one pollutant in the capital. This was discovered in the city playgrounds, which had hundred of times the safe limits for lead. Just image the media fiasco.
The whole running out of oil was based on the continental US oil reserves running down, but then the middle east oil was discovered. If you listen carefully the experts don't say we'll run out but that the cost will increase to a point where other fuels cost less. There will still be plenty of oil for candles and plastics, but it will be too expensive to simply burn for fuel just like we no longer burn whale blubber for fuel.
We can also make candles and plastics out of agricultural oils, and eventually we will. Whether that will be in 200 years or 2000 I can't tell you, and frankly don't care.
I've written a vision program in linux and later one in Windows, I can't see ever doing the windows thing again. By the end of the project I had spent much more time on Windows annoyances than it would have taken to write a linux driver.
Why not use a solid framegrabber like the Osprey? Do you have some super high res progressive scan cameras or something? Most vision research is done on prerecorded video so I'm assuming your doing some real-time tracking. If this is a short 2-4 month project and you need the firewire cameras sticking with the working Windows setup might be the answer. If it's longer there is at least one good book on writing linux drivers (there are pointers in the kernel Docs.)
I prefer the laptop when watching a DVD by myself or with one other. I can take of my contacts and give my eyes some rest. I hook up the sound to my mini-amplifer and speakers, or even the TV if in a hurry for decent sound.
Then there is the whole region thing, cheap DVD players don't play the imports at the local video store (as per their signage, no refunds if you've got a region 1 only DVD player.)
If the price is really high, maybe someone out there will seriously underbid them. While WiFi will always be cheaper it's so much slower. I know I'm always maxing out my two 100Base-T lines because of NFS. My SysAdmin promises Gigabit ethernet next time he buys a switch... Don't get me wrong, I love the WiFi for when I bring in my laptop, but it's not really a replacement for wires. Unless you know everyone is just web browsing or something.
If no one will bid low, maybe you can hire some high school students, buy some testing equipment and do the wiring yourself. It's not exactly rocket science. It won't be so pretty if it's outside the walls but it's never pretty behind desks anyway.
My system itself makes noise. It seems to be tied to "stuff happening" inside the box
I think this is a lot more common than people think. I converted an old PC into a "quiet" PC, well router. Then I started noticing high pitched noises coming from the thing at night. And it was synced with netowork activity. At first I though it was just some errant radio waves getting to the TV. Unplugged it, still there. Unplugged everything but the router(old PC) and a couple network devices, still there. Unplugged the network, still there but much lower.
Later I listened for it in the day time, and it was there, just drowned out by the higher level of white noise. It was probably always there, just too many fans muffling it. I've also had brand new power supplies(A HP Journada ones for one) that made a horrible and sometimes loud noise.
I'm guessing that some small change in the temperature profile of the chip, or maybe the monitor signal filter will get rid of the noise future models of this video card lineage. But I don't recall learning anything about engineering around this type of bug as an EE.
Thats true, but think about Knuth's work on TeX. That is still in serious use.
Still someone would have to make some big contribution to it before users would choose the proprietary version over the free one. Unless they have some kind of monopoly that can force downgrades on users, then the solution is to eliminate the monopoly not build ineffectual legal walls against some of its actions.
One of the circumstances in which software remains current is when it has been widely adopted as a standard for communication.
Right, this has the same natural protection as TEX, it's a defacto standard. Open source is still available in the public domain even after the copyright has expired, for anyone to bug fix.
[early expiration]
I've just got to ask: Why?
Because I've made commercial software that did exactly the same thing that someone had already done in open source. It would have saved humanity a few extra brain cycles if I could have just fixed their implementation and used it. Now I don't think it's fair to use something right away because the author might have written it to fight some entrenced commercial interest, but after a number of years either they have written a copy themselves or will never do so. If the commercial company is still around then it might actually help if some other commercial software incorporates the feature and competes, lowering the price of the software closer to marginal cost. You might say that they could always just call me up and ask for a licence. But there is still a barrier, they need to test the program before deciding they can use it and they aren't likely to do so if there is a significant possibility I might say no.
While working at a commercial company I once e-mailed the author of an unpatented algorithm that advertised source availability in his paper for the code, he said no it's only for non-profits. I had told him I just wanted it as reference for writing my own implementation; The paper wasn't clear on a number of points. It turned out the algorithm didn't deal with one of the cases but we would have saved three programmers a month of work if we had gotten his source to test initially.
Another case, I have a library posted on my website that's under LGPL. But I clearly state that I want just about anyone to be able to use it and will re-licence it for free to just about anyone. But when a commercial company wanted to incorporate it in their product I got like ten e-mails before they were confident they could use it. That's a substancial barrier even if it is just because they are unfamiliar with open source. (The licence I'll give to anyone for free basically says you can distribute a million copies for free. But must still send me bugfixes before each product ship or 10 days thereafter and each copy after one million costs $20. If they are too big for that they must use pure-LGPL if the still want to use it.)
You're going to have to turn the copyright office into something that decides which category a work falls into. If they handle it the way the patent office handles claims, we could see people claiming a software program is derivative of its manual, which has 20 years protection.
Well you could simply say that derivative works get no more protection than they would get if they were copyrighted on their own. And code in books could expire in 5 years even if the rest of the book were protected longer.
If Joe User can run old versions of software, it encourages commercial developers to break these old version rather than simply improve the product.
Software with source would be protected longer even in it's compiled form. The problem I'm trying to address isn't just to force innovation, but to also protect software from companies that go out of business or authors that lose the source on some utility they have forgetten about after X years. I think companies will be less likely to simply break older versions because some home users and small companies would be likely to use the expired versions and those who buy the newer versions would want to interoperate with them. But I may be wrong.
I think 5 years for software and 10 years for source code is more appropriate, and even that's short.
What if after 2 years they could release the source and get the 5 year protection? I think my software numbers could be a little short for small market software, but it's hard to draw that line. I remember some stat in the 80's that 50% of the sales of mass market software were in the first 6 weeks. That's no longer true, probably because software is much more mature now so there isn't as much reason to upgrade. But software written for small markets is still in much need of improvement so a 2 year old program there is probably not very useful. I think 10 years is way to long, it may allow you to get a 95% of possible sales, but I think the 80% mark is a better place to draw the line because of quickly diminishing returns. I left extensions in for those cases where they haven't reached the 80% mark by expiration, but this doesn't apply to free software so it's a little unfair in that.
I came up with my numbers by thinking about when 99% of producers would have realized 80% of potential sales and then added a few years, except in software where I see more damage in stopping progress(probably because I'm involved.)
Basing licensing fees on percentages of gross profit creates accounting problems, as well as a pricing problem, as someone who simply gives the original away for free does not have to pay a license.
True, maybe the extensions idea should be abandoned, or simply be less generous with no accounting requirement. Say 1/4 term, with a flat $10,000 fee.
The moral rights argument with respect to the mandatory licensing scheme after an author's death seems specious to me. If the author's not around to approve it, either the author's estate can approve a derivative work, or the derivative author can wait until the copyright expires.
I was thinking of Nietzsche where his sister was a anti-semite and "saved" his reputation as a hater of anti-semites by holding back his works and editing out things in preparing manuscripts for publishing. It's also informed by those estates who even try to block movie adaptations of log expired copyrights. Maybe there are examples of estates acting on the creators behalf. I almost used the Ayn Rand one as a good example, but she'd probably think of them as leaches on her fame.
A copyright law shouldn't be designed to be GNU friendly; a GNU license should be designed to be responsive to changes in copyright law.
I agree to a point, it shouldn't get any favorable treatment, but I think it should be protected from significantly disfavorable treatment. As a programmer I don't want to just write software that will be immediately ripped off by a commercial interest, especially if I plan to dual licence to make some $$$.
The copy protection clause is just as ridiculous as the DMCA. "Oh, that easily deciphered format is really copy protection, so this isn't under copyright."
I think a reasonable line could be drawn, it's more a result of my anger at copyright being longer than the media the work is recorded on so it may be lost to humanity forever without some criminal activity(which is only likely on the more popular works). With my yearly limits it seems less needed, though I could certainly imagine a publisher loving some paper that disintigrated in the bright light of a copy machine.
The purpose of copyleft is freedom. Once copyleft expires, it is back to the bad old days of breaking interoperability for commercial advantage, keeping the source code secret, so that most programming is duplication of work already done, etc. There is no public interest in having copyleft expire.
Software is rarely current after 5 years, if some commercial company incorperates a source five years after it was initially published they would have to do a lot of work to make it competitive.
If I thought my GNU software were perpetual I'd but an early expiration to public domain in there. In fact I may do so anyway for things I open source from now on.
My thoughts are something like...
30 years fiction
20 years historic, lit-crit, and reference non-fiction
10 years self-help and current affairs non-fiction
5 years registered software (source code published)
2 years non-registered software
With a possible 1/2 period extension if you are still selling at 10% of the rate of the best year of sales.
I don't think the right should automatically expire due to the death of the author if his will states it shouldn't but linence at a reasonable price (no more that 5% of gross say, or 20% of profit) should become cumpulsary since the author is no longer around to say some new adaption isn't to his liking.
This isn't particularly GNU friendly extensions are all based on sales, but I think it would strike a good balance on copyright for society and hence fulfill the main reason programmers choose an open source licence.
I would further add that the source code should be published at the end of support for any software for anyone wishing to copyright their work, and using 'copy protection' should automatically revoke and claims to copyright protection. Hence those wishing to avoid copyright would need to licence everything and sue only the person that violated the contract but once the first copy was made work would be in the open. This would discourage these licences except for made to order software where it makes sense.
I'm just putting this out there because I want to hear what you have to say. Are my numbers to conservative? Too liberal? Just right?
I saw a Transgaming programmer playing Max Payne on his laptop a couple months ago. If they can get a Direct X 8.0 game to run under WineX it is probably your best bet. I looked at their support for it and they said it worked best with the CVS version of Wine, though it still didn't render fonts correctly and would crash when you tried to build stuff. Though they are working on getting it working, and if you buy a copy I know they let you vote for what games to support.
No, because some people's need for communication devices (doctors, for example) far, far outweighs our right to a quiet theatre.
B*llshit! Beepers have been around for years and theaters have been holding them for doctors on call almost as long. If you are a doctor or fighter pilot or whatever either don't go to the theatre when on call or use the services. If you're at a low end place give 'em the $5 tip before the show.
I personally think the laptop guy should have been kicked out, people with their vibrating cellphones and backlit palms are annoying enough.
Enjoy the wireless before the film, get a good seat, and if the film sucks enough to be browsing slashdot, leave.
Use some common sense.
Adding costs to law enforcement means that either fewer crimes get solved or taxes go up.
Hopefully fewer crimes are solved. Remember the police consider perfectely reasonable things like drug trafficing and looking at pictures. When they're forced to narrow down that list of crimes to physically hurting people and or stealing significant amounts of cash or goods we will all be better of.
In the US the federal government is protected from lawsuits by its constitution. Congress can allow citizens to sue it via acts like the the freedom of information act. (Or by abridging natural rights or
rights protected by the constitution itself.)
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I thought about before posting